Date: 7/9/20
Daily Miles: 10
Total Miles: 383
Luckily there were no more cars passing by our campsite last night. There were two hikers that walked by at 4:20am though. Yikes! They had an early start!
This morning was all about gaining back the elevation we lost yesterday after James Peak. We had about six miles of climbing to get back over 13,000 feet again to Mount Flora.
The trail today was very well built. There was a ton of rock work done…at the lower elevations, the trail was built up with basically a rock wall on the lower side…at higher elevations it was largely a path of very big, flat stones. It must have taken an enormous amount of man hours to build all that trail.
It was also a pretty good grade for the whole walk up. As we got closer to the peak, we saw a few other backpackers. At the peak, there were quite a few day hikers coming up. Since it only a three mile climb up for folks, it is probably a pretty popular day hike.
At the top, we met two northbound CDT hikers, Ken and Hobo. They started at the MX border on April 1st, which seemed like such an early start date. But, they seemed to having a good time, minus the San Juan Mountains in southern CO, when they were post-holing up to their waists with snow shoes on.
We were excited for town time in Winter Park, so we headed down the three miles to the state highway. The trail was really good going down and we made good time. We lucked out and got hitches within just five minutes (we had to split up, since getting a hitch for four is much harder than just for two people). It feels good to be clean and to have full bellies!
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